Living in fear of the day that the earth moves once again

IT was a damp, dreich day here in the Western Isles on Monday – not one of passing showers, nor curtains of gentle drizzle, nor a decent halfhour cloudburst with some Wagnerian thunder. It simply rained, heavily and steadily, all day.

And towards teatime in Tarbert, the capital of Harris, part of the steep glen above the main road decided to go for a walk. Tons of peat, clay, stone, heath and shrubbery slid down in seconds with a happy whumph of relief onto the A859 in a shoulder-high heap.

Thus most of Tarbert and much of Harris was quite cut off until Tuesday morning. Meanwhile, later on Monday night, something very similar happened on the old single-track coastal road that meanders round Loch Ainort to the village of Sconser. It is rarely used these days, which is just as well, because at some point in the night a large chunk of it gave up the ghost, collapsing down the hillside towards the Hebridean sea.

Only an earthquake, perhaps, is scarier than a landslide – though both are sudden, remorseless, quite out of your control, and as if the very Earth itself has risen (or, in the latter case, tumbled) against you. And many Scots live uneasily with this problem.

If you eschew the ferries across the Clyde and are approaching Argyll from the south, the main A83 road – looping bravely up the mountains from Arrochar, and cresting a summit deliciously named the Rest and Be Thankful – twists through many tight spots and is most vulnerable to landslips.

The highway has been repeatedly closed by them – 2007, 2009, 2012, 2014… that last collapse of some mountainside shut the A83 for two weeks and residents were forced to make a 75-mile detour or take the Dunoon ferry.

But the Rest and Be Thankful is not alone. My usual route from the islands to Edinburgh, by Crianlarich and Stirling, takes me through Glen Ogle – very prone to throw geological hissy fits.

The most celebrated Glen Ogle landslide was on September 27, 1965, darkly appreciated by many as it seemed a rude gesture to the infamous Dr Beeching, who had recently condemned the Callander & Oban railway to closure.

THE last trains were to run through Glen Ogle in November that year, but the mountains did the job sooner. There was a mighty fall of rock, and it can still be viewed nervously today from the main A85 road on the other side of the glen – almost casually strewn boulders, some the size of small houses. Fortunately no train was on the tracks.

But on August 18, 2004, motorists were not so fortunate and 57 terrified people, including children and babies, had to be winched to safety after two near-simultaneous landslides trapped about 20 vehicles on the Glen Ogle road, where they could be reached only by helicopter.

Also keeping an uneasy eye on the hills is the village of Lochcarron and the wider Applecross peninsula, traditionally reached by ferry over the Strome narrows – saving a 140-mile detour by Beauly, Garve and Achnasheen.

Then in 1970 the ‘Strome Bypass’ road was completed along the south shores of Loch Carron. It is a highway many fervently believe should never have been built – vulnerable to snow and running over, and often beneath, cliffs of pretty rotten rock.

Rockfalls and landslips are incessant. There are tales of terrified teenagers in a minibus one night as boulders bounced all over the road. From December 2012, a collapse closed the highway for four months and the wee Kylerhea ferry had to come to the rescue.

Right now, three months of ‘remedial works’ are in progress with the road closed each night from 10pm to 7am. Highland Council contractors are also assembling a sort of Scalextric road-on-rail bypass, like tramlines on the parallel railway to Kyle, which will allow some (carefully timetabled) motoring at night. Meanwhile the Scottish Government has yet to commit to the permanent restoration of a ferry service, far less a Strome bridge.

The one cause for thankfulness is that landslides in Britain rarely kill. The last fatality was in North Wales in 2001, when the unfortunate occupants of a car were swept over a 200ft precipice.

What landslips all seem to have in common is long and heavy rain, most apt to cause problems after a protracted drought. And rain there was in abundance in Harris on Monday – a local weather station recorded 43.2mm of it, or almost two inches.

And peat is funny stuff – a jelly, really, with counterintuitive properties. When it is allowed to dry, it shrinks, and cracks, and no degree of soaking thereafter will reflate it.

This on occasion leads to a ‘bogburst’, as happened near Morsgail, in the south-west of Lewis, at a remote but pretty little loch. We must take the word of local pensioners for that – because, one day in 1959, the loch disappeared.

HEAVY rain had drained through cracked underground peat, created an oily layer of sludge beneath it, and finally the land could no more bear the weight of loch above.

Though no one saw it, in a matter of minutes the entire loch poured away as if someone had pulled a plug, leaving a stark slimy crater so big that, for weeks thereafter, there was wild talk of a meteorite strike.

The story has subsequently been seized upon by the thriller writer Peter May, who likewise obliterates a Lewis loch in the last of his Hebridean Trilogy to reveal (of course) a long-lost plane with a very dead body.

Not all landslides involve peat, but all involve ‘slope deposits’ – topsoils, silts, clays, cobbles, in a mix the British Geological Survey deliciously describes as ‘colluvium’. But its interest is also practical, sending its Landslide Response Team to any incident they can lay their sturdy gloves on, advising the authorities how it happened, how to stop it happening again and how to protect the public.

Sturdy wire netting down a dodgy cliff can minimise the risk to traffic of a rockfall. In Glen Ogle and along the Rest and Be Thankful, you can see assorted dams and ‘catch pits’ to alleviate landslide impact.

But in Strome, Argyll and elsewhere there is real, murmuring resentment that the safety of lifeline roads in remote and rural Scotland is of little concern to distant Edinburgh officials and the Scottish Government.

Only a few minutes ago, an Inveraray friend was in touch with the news that his sister, on her way home from Glasgow on a bus, was caught with her fellow passengers in a Rest And Be Thankful rockfall. ‘Flying rubble, and the windows smashed,’ he said. ‘They had to drive to Inveraray with smashed windows…’

Landslides can startle, and even impress – but there is nothing impressive about living in daily fear.